


I Am and So Are You

by Lozlan



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:57:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lozlan/pseuds/Lozlan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trillian snapped the Guide shut with a snort of disgust. Leaning back into the anti-gravitational embrace of her seat, she sipped at a cup of Algolian brandy. The liquid tingled unpleasantly on her tongue, the bitter tang of ethanol and liquidated tiger fang causing her head to spin. Rescued, fuck. She’d saved Zaphod, saved Arthur, saved the entire universe from a horrific – though admittedly genial -demise. And what was her reward? She grimaced and endured another drink before turning her attention towards the plasti-sealed observation portal to her left. The stars streaked past, fast needles of light engulfed in the blackness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Am and So Are You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amalnahurriyeh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amalnahurriyeh/gifts).



This is what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has to say on the subject of Tricia McMillan.

Tricia McMillan is a strange, apelike being hailing from a derelict planet known formerly as Earth. On her native world she was a practitioner of the quaint and savage art of astrophysics, something the Guide helpfully parallels with witchcraft and some of the slightly less metaphysical methods of removing warts. She escaped Earth shortly before its quite needful and bureaucratic demolition, fleeing with newly-‘elected’ President of the Universe Zaphod Beebelbrox.

(The article here diverged for several hundred micro-pages, riddled with trumpetings of Zaphod’s sexual prowess, lineage, and below-absolute-zero coolness. Trillian’s finger tabbed through the non-data with furious impatience. Ford’s name was predictably signed to the entry).

Tricia McMillan (the Guide finally continued) undertook many adventures with her virile tri-armed loved, developing a keen knack for being rescued. Of particular note was her capture by the extraxenphobic denizens of planet Krikket, who sealed her in a glass coffin and were preparing to fire her into a neutron star when Zaphod Beeblebrox arrived astride a Vulgarian strug lizard, his eyes blazing with fury and love. Unholstering his atomic aetherizer, he bellowed a war cry and eradicated his foes with a single lambent pulse of energy. Trillian fell into his well-muscles arms, chest heaving and eyelids fluttering –

Trillian snapped the Guide shut with a snort of disgust. Leaning back into the anti-gravitational embrace of her seat, she sipped at a cup of Algolian brandy. The liquid tingled unpleasantly on her tongue, the bitter tang of ethanol and liquidated tiger fang causing her head to spin. Rescued, fuck. She’d saved Zaphod, saved Arthur, saved the entire universe from a horrific – though admittedly genial -demise. And what was her reward? She grimaced and endured another drink before turning her attention towards the plasti-sealed observation portal to her left. The stars streaked past, fast needles of light engulfed in the blackness.

Her reward was Zero class. A theoretical construct of a class existing beyond the parameters of First Class, Zero Class had been recently discovered by a rogue physicist who was sick and tired of waiting interminably for hot compresses and lemon-scented napkins. He had gone mad, achieved godhood, been crushed by the Galactic Society for Active Disbelief in Such Things, and then marketed his extradimensional revelation to several competing spacelines, thus allowing him a very comfortable and non-omniscient existence.

Trillian sighed. Whatever she wanted, it materialized. Whatever she craved, it manifested. Except, strangely, for hot compresses and lemon-scented napkins, which were somehow exempt from the rules. She watched as her drink re-manifested itself. Not Algolian brandy, not this time. She tipped back the glass, closed her eyes, and savored the subtle, almost-forgotten taste of a cool Earthen beer.

She was a journalist. A damn fine journalist, dammit. One of the only journalists willing to brave the perils of the space-time continuum to deliver stories a day, a week, a month in advance of their occurrence. Trillian angrily swished the beer around the inside of her mouth, and swallowed with belligerence. It didn’t say that anywhere in Ford’s entry, of course.

Her right hand briefly aged into a shriveled husk, then regressed back into semi-youthful plumpness. Trillian closed it into a fist. Zero Class was one of the few ways to travel into the future, and it was certainly the only method that involved one’s every desire being granted. Trillian preferred it despite the occasional hiccup, though she did find it mildly unnerving that that rest of the starliner was not only traveling to a different destination, but a different epoch. She drained the beer in one long go, returning her attention to the streaking starscape. All civilization, all life, all time – she had saved it. Twice. Or was it three times? She sank into her seat, mumbling obscenities as her beer transmogrified into the neatly severed head of Ford Prefect.

A trolley rolled along the aisle, weaving around several hovering globes of internal consciousness. It was pushed by a matronly blob of plasma with several waving flagellum; steam rose into the air, accompanied by a faint lemony scent. Trillian stirred and inhaled, forcing her mind to clear. The severed head shivered and collapsed into a visible sine wave that would have driven her mad if she had gazed directly into its depths.

The blob’s trolley lurched to a halt beside Trillian. The flagellum shivered, a moment of alarm. “Ma’am,” came a distinctly phlegmatic gurgle, “please do not attempt to conceive of the existence of lemon-scented napkins and/or hot compresses.” It waved several viscous tentacles towards a light-up sign glaring through the aether, making this exact proclamation. “It is not safe, and certainly not Gelatinous.”

Trillian’s eyes opened in surprise. Immediately she shifted the direction of her thoughts, and the shimmering wound in the universe sealed, leaving a momentary scar.

The blob of plasma quivered with pleasure. “Thank you, thank you. Now, can I interest you in a lemon-scented napkin or a hot compress?”

Trillian shook her head in the negative. Raising a hand to her mouth, she began chewing at her nails with unconscious ferocity. “No thanks. I’m fine.”

The blob oscillated. “Hey…don’t I know you?”

Trillian’s heart leapt in her chest. She had only been on the Sub-Etha a month, barely enough time to form much of a reputation. She straightened in her seat, turning her full attention – and facial features – towards the blob of plasma. It was the most startling ochre color, shot through with subplasms of green and blue. “You might,” she said, in a voice that was half-proud and half-terrified. “I’m a reporter for Vega Cosmic News and Sundry.”

The blob rippled, then shrank. “Don’t watch the news,” it said. “I hate politics.”

“It’s not politics,” Trillian corrected quickly. “Unless the person I’m surprising in bed is a politician, of course.”

The blob seemed nonplussed by this. Trillian cursed inwardly; she’d just tried to tantalize a mitotic entity with sex. “It’s not politics,” she reiterated, sitting forward. “It’s usually something far more…Gelatinous.”

Programming for single-celled organisms had once been a major problem for the Sub-Etha broadcasting syndicates. How could one sculpt a drama, craft a murder, or turn a joke without the constant carnal underpinning of sexuality? More importantly, how could one advertise to creatures wholly devoid of bodily desire? The answer, cooked up over several generations of syndicate scions, was to inculcate the entire swathe of single-celled eukaryotic life-forms with a vested interest in being as perfectly Gelatinous as possible. No longer was it merely a word used to describe tacky Jell-O molds or oddities nesting in the bowels of a refrigerator – no. It was an ideal, a state of being, a desired wanted and needed _thing_.

Responding to countless cytokinetic separations (generations, Trillian’s Earth-brain supplanted) of programming, the plasma blob rippled with renewed excitement. “Gelatinous, you say?”

“Very Gelatinous. I expose scandal, investigate crimes, report on riddles.” Trillian leaned back in her anti-gravity manifestation of a chair, nearly breathless with self-aggrandizement. She watched in frustration as the blob’s hue altered from fiery red to a dull, contemplative puce. “In short, I shine the light of inquiry on the whole of Galactic existence. That is what I do.”

The blob shifted, a dollop of plasma dripping onto Trillian’s arm. “Wait. Didn’t I see you on the late-night reel last week? You were reporting on a marriage or something.”

Trillian grit her teeth. “That marriage,” she said, willing her rictus into a semi-pleasant smile, “is of great Galactic importance. Or it will be, once Princess Augra and Prince Legan’s great-great-grandson becomes the Butcher of Betelgeuse.”

The blob managed to shrug. “As I said, I don’t like politics.” It paused for a moment, congealing ponderously. “Though…I think know you from somewhere else, too.”

The ship lurched in hyperspace, a blip in its superluminal travel. Trillian’s body shimmered, faded, reappeared. She frowned her annoyance as the blob of plasma emitted a worried flailing. “Oh, dear,” it wailed, concerned bubbles frothing through its cellular wall. “You aren’t from any of the Plural sectors, by any chance?”

Trillian reached into her ever-present bag, the only one she’d owned since leaving her first bag on Earth. From it she produced a small, translucent grounding node, its sealed tesseract flickering. “I’m fine,” she said sharply. “Now, tell me. Tell me where else you know me from.” She spoke with masochistic eagerness, knowing the answer before it was exuded.

The blob regained its composure. “I could swear,” it said, the gurgle of its voice only mildly uncertain, “that you were Zaphod Beeblebrox’s girlfriend.”

The expected red lights, the predicted explosions. Trillian clamped her jaw shut with a rush of fury. “I think you have the wrong person,” she said, thrusting the node back into her bag. “Sorry.” Her hands clamped shut as she spoke, fingernails digging bloodied tracks into the palms of each hand. Turning back towards the observation port, she mordantly watched a galaxy flare into existence and die into a hellion of starfire as the drink in her hand refilled, this time with something much stronger.

The blob wavered uncertainly, the puce coloration warming into a guilty green. “But…you are really a reporter?” it inquired. The steam rising from the hot compresses had faded into a faint mist.

Trillian winced and turned away from the soothing spectacle of celestial entropy. “Yes,” she said, raising the glass to her lips. “I specialize in pointlessness. Gossip and spectacle.” The liquid seared her tongue, and she molecularly altered it to not chew through her esophagus. A smoking droplet pattered on her Bugblatter Beast-leather boots.

The blob continued to waver. “So…nothing particularly Gelatinous?”

“Nothing particularly.”

The blob of plasma sighed. It began to push the trolley forward, hairlike pili rasping together; then it stopped. Slowly, oozing with empathy, it slathered towards Trillian and offered her a now quite-lukewarm compress. “Here,” it said, simply and sadly.

Trillian sighed. She accepted the compress, laid it over her eyes. The world went mercifully dark.

“Are…are you chasing a story right now?”

It was a question asked out of utter contrition, polite and quite properly Gelatinous. Trillian nodded to the void. “Yes,” she said, forcing a hint of steel into her voice. “I’m bound for the Prison of Chronos.”

She could no longer see the blob, but she heard the wet belch of its fear. “Whatever for?” it asked, squeaking in a most unplasmalike fashion.

“To interview the most dangerous man in the Universe.”

Another wet belch, a eukaryotic expression of dismay. “That is…almost Gelatinous,” the blob said grudgingly. Slurping around the handles of its cart, it departed without another word. Trillian smiled, knowing without looking that it was now glowing the vivid magenta hue of terror. Her hand tightened on the glass as she turned her thoughts inward, away, down. One interview, one expose, and her career would rocket through the…something or other. An ionosphere seemed a somewhat anticlimactic thing, when one was accustomed to interstellar travel. She settled back into her chair, only starting for a moment when her drink transmogrified into a pair of very familiar, very unwelcome heads.

*

The Prison of Chronos was a stark, imposing, incredibly gray structure. Trillian stared up at the entirely needless parapets, the gurgling moat of acid, and the looming bulk of the prison block with professional satisfaction. Pulling out an 8-dimensional image capturing device, she snapped several stills before advancing towards the yawning maw of the gatehouse. Birds circled overhead, cawing heinously, their blood-red beaks clacking and snapping.

The Prison was located in a pocket dimension. A literal pocket dimension - massive balls of parti-colored lint littered the landscape. Just exactly whose pocket it was was up for debate: numerous religious sects had warred each other into extinction in an attempt to arrive at a consensus. Trillian frowned as she neared the gatehouse, the plaid weave of the landscape sagging slightly beneath her tread. Only one thing was certain: it was definitely the pocket of a long-abused, frayed dressing gown. She thrust a rising revelation to the very back of her mind, there to toil in obscurity.

The gatehouse was guarded by a massive lump of flesh and fangs, a genetically-engineered beast with eyeballs liberally sprinkling its face, back, and front. She flashed her ID, and the creature split into something that could be loosely defined as a grin. “Hey there!” it exclaimed, rumbling voice clearly suffused with glee. “You must be the visitor. We get them so rarely. May I see your pass again?” Forty eyeballs slid shut, opened, a body-wide blink.

Trillian re-flashed her ID, wondering which set of eyeballs to address. She settled on a cluster spangling the guard’s left kneecap. “I want to get this over with as quickly as possible,” she confided, glancing up at the crumbling, talonesque pinnacles of the prison. “Er, previous engagement.”

The hulking entity nodded in slightly crestfallen understanding. “Don’t worry too much,” it said, motioning her forward and casually hoisting up the rust—encrusted portcullis with one sausagelike finger. “You could linger here for a thousand years, and still make it out in time for a late lunch.” There was an infinite sadness in its voice, a wild longing barely contained.

Trillian merely nodded in response, hurrying through the gaping stone aperture. It was true, she knew; The Prison of Chronos was some bureaucrat’s ingenious solution to the overcrowding of the Galaxy’s swollen prison system. Time passed swiftly here, very swiftly, very very swiftly; a criminal could be admitted, rehabilitated, derehabilited, reimprisoned, and ultimately die of extreme old age before more than a handful of seconds had passed in what was laughably regarded as the ‘normal’ universe. The only downside was that falsely imprisoned inmates had often been dead for several millennia before their appeals reached a sympathetic ear. Indeed, many was the Galactic judge who shook his sere head in sympathy as he sat poolside on some opulent resort planet, enjoying the obligatory nine-month vacation allowed by doing away with all those pesky appeals processes.

Trillian shuddered as the portcullis slid shut with a long metallic groan. No guards accompanied her; there was nowhere to run except the plaid-patterned foothills, where one risked consumption by herds of colossal dust mites. She passed down the long stone throat, emerging into a slightly more contemporary chamber lit with flickering fluorescent lights. The transition from medieval to clinical was a bit jarring, and she compensated for her surprise by pretending that she was visiting an amusement park. She’d made it to Disneyworld one time before the destruction of the Earth, and had experienced similar sensations of intimidation, dismay, nausea, and bald uncompromising despair.

A second guard stood at the end of the long, flickering hallway. It was a spindly, horrific creature, some geneticist’s nightmare composition of a spider, a hyena, and something far more unpleasant than either. “Hello,” it hissed, waving several spindly limbs in her direction. “You are Trillian Astra, here to see…” it paused for a moment, multi-faceted eyes growing wide, “…the prisoner?”

Trillian nodded, unease making her impatience palpable. “Yes. Take me to him. Please.”

The guard hissed, a strange hideous variety of laughter. “Watch yourself,” it said, stepping aside and grinding open a circular metallic door.

Trillian stepped through the portal, now plagued by the impression that she was stepping inside a bomb shelter constructed by Hobbits. The circular door swung shut behind her, and she stood in utter darkness for a moment before the lights flickered into life. Her face was bathed in a softer incandescent glow, and she blinked, staring around herself. The room was small, grimy, and moist. It was also completely empty.

Well, that wasn’t quite right. There was a table. For a few feverish moments Trillian dealt with the realization that the Most Dangerous Man in the Universe could, in fact, be descended from a race that just happened to resemble tacky office furniture. She approached the table, turned on her quantum recorder, cleared her throat, and said decisively, “Er?”

The table made no response. Trillian rallied her senses; she was talking like Arthur, for Arkleseizer’s sake. Just for good measure she prodded the table with her toe: nothing. It was just a massive table hewn of wood, glistening with sickening coffee-dark lacquer. She had been fired by her first boss from behind just such a mahogany monstrosity.

Something shuffled behind her. Trillian whirled around, her hand leaping to the concealed Kill-O-Zap gun secreted in the cuff of her shirt. She took aim at an indistinct shadow, sitting cross-legged in the only dark corner the room supplied. “Don’t move,” she hissed, finger settling on the trigger. “I know how to use this.”

The shadow shrugged, rising uneasily to its feet. “Baby,” it said in a smooth, determinedly laconic voice, “point that thing someplace else. I’m allergic to dying. Gives me hives.”

A new chill entered Trillian’s blood. Her finger spasmed on the trigger, and she barely averted her aim at the last moment. A writhing bolt of energy collided with the stone wall and was promptly absorbed with a soft, purring sigh.

The shadow stepped forward. Two legs, standing in a straddling poise. Three arms, artfully crossed. Two heads, grinning infuriatingly, the white flash of teeth beating back the press of shadows. “Hey, Tril,” Zaphod said with a wave that managed to be both perfunctory and practiced. He cocked his heads together, grinned wider, and took a step forward.

The Kill-O-Zap gun jerked back into position. “What the hell is this?” Trillian demanded, her voice boiling with rage. She mirrored his forward step, and Zaphod fell back, his smiles completely and utterly failing to falter.

“Hey,” Zaphod said again. He eyed the gun disaffectedly. “You look good, girl. Real good. Almost good enough to be on my arm again.” He unfurled all three of his pertinent limbs as he spoke, his impeccable imitation Nehru jacket glistening with sequins. “You can choose which one, of course.”

The gun didn’t waver. “What are you doing here?” Trillian demanded. A cold, coiling realization sprang on her, and she shushed Zaphod’s response with a bob of the gun’s chrome-plated barrel. “No, wait, don’t answer that. If I get any more pissed off, what passes for your brains will be busy decorating the wall.”

Zaphod shrugged, one set of eyes now keenly focused on Trillian’s weapon. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked, voice a long low drawl. “Come on, babe. You get the drift. You always did.”

Trillian groaned, inwardly and outwardly. This was insane. Far more insane than her interview with the Altarian Minister of Palindromes, and light-millennia ahead of her twelve-part expose on Stagyar Zil Doggo’s sentient codpiece. A yawning hollow opened in the pit of her stomach as she admitted through clenched teeth, “You’re the prisoner I'm here to interview."

Zaphod grinned even more widely. “You must be overjoyed to see me,” he said, brushing a nonexistent speck of dust from his glistening breeches. “I know the feeling. I looked in the mirror this morning.”

Trillian yanked herself from the tide of despair. “I really don’t think,” she said with a growl, “that you have the slightest idea how I feel.” She opened her eyes and squared the gun, a murderous impulse causing her arm to tremble. “You’re many things, Zaphod, most of which can’t be mentioned in polite company. But you’re certainly not the most dangerous man in the Universe.”

Zaphod shrugged. Three sets of fingers snapped, and the lighting in the room suddenly altered. Artificial candlelight fluttered on the air, and a pulse of sensuous music echoed over unseen speakers. “Of course not,” he said, crossing to the table and tapping it. Immediately the hideous desk vanished, replaced by a teakwood table strewn with luscious food. “Just the third most deadly. But I cut a deal with the guards. I wanted you back, babe. Wanted you back where you should be: with me.” He laughed at his own proclamation, picking up a carafe hewn of solid diamond and pouring out a cup of wine. The sequins on his jacket glittered luminously, lit by some internal power source.

Trillian’s rage actually faltered at Zaphod’s declaration. “You had yourself locked up,” she said in a slow cadence, “in the most hideous prison in any Universe, in a dimension riddled with _lint_ , in order to win me back?” It was a ridiculous concept, entirely foolish, entirely Zaphod.

The ex-president of the Galaxy picked up the sparkling cup of wine and extended it to her. “Got it in one,” he said. “It was a bit tricky, I’ll admit. I’ve been here for, oh –” he glanced at a very nonexistent watch, “- about two thousand years, local time.”

The syrupy music melted into Trillian’s ears, making her head spin. She fell back, pressed herself against the far wall. “You expect me to believe that?” she said sharply.

“Oh, they put me on ice for the duration. I told them I was so incredibly cool that I could hibernate without a cryochamber, but the guards insisted.” Zaphod still held out the wine, but his smiles were fading. He took a step forward, and Trillian raised her gun.

“You – I can’t - this –“ Trillian couldn’t manage to sputter out a complete sentiment. The blackness of Zaphod’s gravitational pull was replaced by the equally yawning fate of her dead-end career, tugging eagerly at her ankles, dragging her down into ignominy. She had come here for something unique, something perilous. Something that would write up REALLY well. Instead, here she stood, staring into those two idiot faces and feeling gelatinous. And not in the positive philosophical sense.

Zaphod lowered the glass. “It’s almost like you’re not exquisitely happy to see me,” he said in a crestfallen voice.

The Kill-O-Zap gun was held in her hands. The chrome pressed against her flesh with a cool dispassionate sting. Trillian swallowed, stood erect. An unknown coldness flooded her body, something new and vengeful.

“Are you worried about the story?” Zaphod said suddenly. It was a queer moment of prescience, something he occasionally excelled at. Setting down the wine, he flashed a renewed set of grins. “Don’t fret, Tril. You can be all over the Sub-Etha without a good cover story.” Lowering his eyes into the semblance of a seductive glare, he strode towards her, pressing his chest against the muzzle of her gun. “I’m all better, babe. I’m back to being a Zarkin’ hoopy frood, with good looks to spare. I am so hip, I have difficulty seeing over my own pelvis. I’m so amazingly cool –"

“-I could keep a side of meat in you for a week,” Trillian finished bitterly.

“I was gonna go for a gallon of milk for a month, but you catch my drift.” Zaphod reached out a hand, obligatorily caressed her cheek. “Come with me, Tril. Be my woman again. I’ll even let you get your bag this time.” He double-winked, an act Trillian had always found disconcerting.

“So…what then?” she stammered, shying from his touch. “I just forget my dreams, lay aside my desires, and ‘get famous’ being your brainless bimbo girlfriend?”

Zaphod's faces lit up suddenly. “Hey, I know! If you still feel like reporting, you can write a memoir. That’s what all my other mistresses do.”

Trillian harrumphed. She toyed for the briefest of moments with the delicious intention of blowing Zaphod away; then, sliding the Kill-O-Zap gun back into its concealed thong in her sleeve, she shoved past him and swept the sumptuous meal onto the floor. Silver fluted objects crashed to the ground alongside caviar, Perfectly Normal Beast cutlets, and a strange wriggling substance whose obvious inedibility marked it as a delicacy. “We need to talk,” Trillian said.

Zaphod watched her with an increasing expression of dismay. The wineglass hung forgotten in his hand. “Talk,” he muttered, flashing a false reassuring grin towards what Trillian suspected was a security camera. He hesitated for a moment before approaching the table, feet slipping in the aforementioned wriggling substance.

Trillian reached into her bag. “I came here for an interview,” she said, withdrawing the quantum recorder and placing it on the now-bare table. “I plan on having one.” She flipped on the device, was rewarded by the warm hum of pirouetting quarks. “Now, Zaphod. Start talking.”

Zaphod’s grins returned, this time tempered with an uncharacteristic wariness. “I don’t have a script.”

“That’s the idea.”

A coolness settled on the room. Zaphod made one final, desultory motion with the wine before choking it down in a single gulp. Trillian watched him keenly; she knew the workings of his mind, or rather minds. Quips, tall tales, lecherous fables – they flashed in Zaphod’s eyes as he turned and stood opposite the recorder, tiny smiles on his lips. “Is this thing on?” he asked coyly.

“Zaphod,” Trillian replied, her voice a monument to cool professionalism, “tell me about The Man in the Shack.”

Zaphod’s skin went a peculiar, intense mottled shade of green. “Tril,” he said, leaning in close, “are you sure you don’t feel like being seduced? I’ve got a hypo-limo out back. One word – less than one word – and it’s Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters for breakfast all the way to Barnard’s Star.”

Trillian flicked her recording device. “Just answer the question.”

So it began. Trillian maneuvered them towards a discussion of inter-time politics and the metaphysical significance of the non-Cathedral of Chalesm; Zaphod’s reply consisted of a cool, considerate nod followed by vivid descriptions of his most recent exploits with Eccentrica Gallbumbits, the (now quadruple-breasted, after a recent surgery) whore of Eroticon 6. Trillian was game: she countered with probing questions on the intergalactic sex trade, which launched Zaphod into an entirely new fabrication of indecency. The walls began to blush a faint pink, crafted as they were out of tough but predictably bashful Sense-o-crete.

An hour in, Trillian’s passion for the inquisition began to dim. The guards had brought in two comfortable lounge-chairs, and Zaphod sat at his leisure, sucking on a thin, flickering cigarette. He spoke with an affected drawl that was intended to grate on Trillian particularly; it was the harbinger of Faux-Stupid Zaphod, a vacuous entity that Sly Zaphod and Disturbingly Prescient Zaphod could usher in at will. His eyes were drowsy and heavy-lidded, wreathed in a fume of smoke.

“…and that,” he said, blowing out a sensuous puff, “is how to achieve a Moebius orgasm. Neverending, spiraling pleasure.” He grinned at her, smoke lingering in the apertures of his nostrils. “Care to give it a try?”

Trillian sighed, leaning back in her own annoyingly overcomfortable chair. The truth. She needed just a splinter, just a grain, just a Higgs-Bosom of truth.

If only she’d had a bottle of Old Janx Spirit.

The grounding node in Trillian’s bag flickered in response to her desire, the tesseract twitching anxiously. Something materialized in her hand, something solid and real and suspiciously sloshy. Trillian glanced down in surprise to see a clear, gleaming bottle of Old Janx Spirt resting in the palm of her hand.

Zaphod blew out a meticulous smoke ring. “Just got contacted by the Galactic government,” he said through renewed grins. “They told me that if my personal mythology keeps expanding, I’ll qualify as a minor deity on my next tax return.”

Trillian forced a tolerant smirk onto her face. She glanced down at the bottle, making absolutely certain that it was real. It was. She suppressed an intense urge to grin maniacally: apparently hailing from the Plural sectors meant a good deal more than the unnerving proclivity to cease existing. Raising the bottle, she plonked it onto the table with a determined air.

Zaphod cut off another self-aggrandizing sentence mid-stream. He stared at the liquor, the corners of his lips beginning to twitch. “Hey,” he managed, flashing Trillian an uncertain look. “A little Betel-juice. Not what I was expecting.”

Trillian smiled. Swiping some crystal chalices off the floor, she poured two heavy servings of Betelgeuse’s signature beverage. Without a word she passed a cup to Zaphod, who accepted it in a similarly taciturn manner. For several moments they merely stared at each other. The walls turned a mottled brown, the hue of uncomfortable expectation.  
Then, “I want to propose a toast,” Trillian announced.

Zaphod changed a color to match the walls. “Now, girl, hey,” he began.

Trillian raised her glass on high. “To the bold, the brave, the dead,” she began, a solemn intonation.

“Hey, now, those are special words –“

Trillian cut him off. She spoke the sacral Betelgeuisian toast of the starfarer, speaking in loud declamatory tones. Finally she extended her cup, and Zaphod, completely incapable upon his non-honor to refuse, took a drink. Then he sat back, looking considerably more nervous than he had before.

Trillian took a quick nonceremonial sip from her chalice before sitting back. “Well then,” she said, eyeing Zaphod expectantly.

Zaphod smiled, the desperate expression of an insect about to be pinned. “Listen, Tril. This whole thing isn’t working out. I’m actually a married man now. In fact, why don’t we chalk this whole encounter up to a sleazy liason? That’d make great cover ink.”

Nervous. Panicking. Good. “You joined me in the toast,” Trillian said. “You can only speak the truth.”

Zaphod twitched, his fingers curling inwards. He was caught and held, a tesseract momentarily trapped in amber: Trillian thought this a very apt metaphor until she remembered the very non-metaphoric tesseract she was toting around in her bag alongside a nest of tattered travel brochures and lipstick cartridges. Leaning forward, she excised that disappointment by asking, purely and simply, “When you were running for President of the Galaxy, did you really vote for yourself over twelve trillion times?”

Zaphod’s faces distorted, his mouths gagging. Trillian watched eagerly. The truth would emerge, eventually, hacked up like something unpleasant on a priceless carpet.

The seconds stretched into minutes. Zaphod warred with his very nature, rocked back and forth, moaned and cursed and flailed as the truth crept toward his lips. Yet the oath bound him. Finally, in a small, gulping voice, he managed to say, “yes.”

“I’m sorry,” Trillian prodded. “Could you repeat that?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes!”

“Yes, you could repeat that? Or yes, you voted for myself over twelve trillion times?”

Zaphod’s eyes bulged; his heads rolled madly, knocking together. “Both!” he screamed, falling from his chair. “I voted for myself. Over twenty trillion times, actually.”

Trillian shook her head at him faintly. “You would have won the election anyway.”

“It’s…the lack of principal of the thing.”

Trillian deactivated the quantum recorder. Raising the cup of Old Janx, she repeated the oath, took a heavy drink, and set it aside. “Zaphod,” she said, staring down at his prone form, “I’ve spoken the words of the guild. Now all we can do, both of us, is tell the truth.”

Zaphod reached towards her, a desperate twisting grip. “I don’t exactly love you,” he declared.

“I know that.”

“But I like you.”

“I like you. Sometimes.”

“The sex was great.”

“The sex was good.”

A flicker of Zaphod’s mischievous smiles returned. “Now now,” he said. “No lies.”

Trillian blushed, hesitantly returned the smile. “It was pretty great.”

“Yes.”

“And totally in what we laughingly call the past.”

Zaphod opened his mouth to protest. But the oath bound his tongue; after a moment he merely nodded. “Yes.”

Trillian held up her recorder. “Can I run this?”

“I dunno. Not sure I actually want to be a minor deity.”

Trillian pondered this for a moment. “Think of it as pantheonic mobility.”

“All right. As long as you promise to slaughter something in my name.”

Trillian smiled. Kneeling beside Zaphod, she dashed a quick kiss on each of his foreheads. “Stay out of my life,” she said.

The circular door swung open, closed.


End file.
